What to do with this pervasive sense of
the arbitrary? Winter is an onion or
a turnip. Or what’s to keep me from
remembering a dogwood I once knew?
It expended its pink petals like coins.
The crickets resurrect in groups and
hide behind unbelievably narrow planes—
the swing’s strings. How do they do this?

.............

PROBLEMS & IMPLICATIONS

In the final version of this day, we all played boggle
and went home no worse for it. But that didn’t
happen. In the first version, the men played
Chet Baker and smoked at the dining room table.
They were from Italy, there were no women,
I wasn’t there. Nearby, in the dark, was a scalable
castle wall. In the fifty-first version, we searched
the streets and shops of the old city for sea-glass
bottles, for the translucent contours of them
to display on the mantels in our homes, all hues,
though we comprehended the problems & implications
of this sort of collecting behavior.

...........

SNOW IN THE NIGHT

It snowed in the night and the parked cars changed
into strange potatoes. A man with a motorized plough
began early. His machine could be heard grinding
the light dusting, really for all intents and purposes,
a sparkling. He traversed the same lane by the graves
over and over. Overhead, in a plane, passengers ate
small, perfectly rendered carrots. They fell asleep
not reading subtitles on screens, not dreaming specifically.
Of multiple moons, a soft landing. Or of a sudden test
in which they were asked to quickly name any song
they loved, or at the very least, liked, and found, much
to their own dismay, they couldn’t think of even one.

BIO: Michelle Meier is a writer, photographer, school administrator and art teacher. Her
work has been published in The 2River View, The Dialogist, and elsewhere. In 2011, she
was nominated for Pushcart Prize. She lives in Washington Heights, New York.